The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  The worst part of this experience for Lewis, who had been suffering nightmares of his own, was the feeling of being drawn into a maelstrom—“a sort of horrible sympathy with the Doc’s yellings and grovellings—a cursed feeling that I could quite easily do it myself.” It seemed to him, moreover, that Askins had opened himself to spiritual invasion by dabbling in the arcana of theosophy, yoga, and psychoanalysis. An ardent spiritualist friend, the wife of Lewis’s history tutor, hardly helped matters with her suggestion that Askins’s troubles would end as soon as he crossed over to the etheric plane. Yeats, Cranny, dear Miss Cowie, and now Doc Askins—the message could not be more clear: “it was to this, this raving on the floor, that all romantic longings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end.” Lewis resolved to be normal: “Safety first, thought I: the beaten track, the approved road, the center of the road, the lights on.” He wrote to warn Arthur: “Keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritualism, of everything eccentric. Keep to work and sanity and open air—to the cheerful & the matter of fact side of things. We hold our mental health by a thread: & nothing is worth risking it for.”

  This commitment to commonsense, stoical realism “satisfied an emotional need,” he tells us in Surprised by Joy. “I wanted Nature to be quite independent of our observation; something other, indifferent, self-existing.” He would accept the universe as it is: “No more Avalon, no more Hesperides. I had … ‘seen through’ them. And I was never going to be taken in again.” His spiritual longings could be safely reclassified as aesthetic longings and enjoyed as such; for as his philosophy tutor E. F. Carritt (fellow in philosophy at University College and a disciple of Benedetto Croce) assured him, art was a sphere of its own in which even the most hardheaded realist could take moral holidays.

  … And Idealism

  But Lewis was not consistent. Surprised by Joy depicts a steady progression from materialism to idealism to pantheism to Christianity, but Lewis’s letters and diary entries—often at odds with the chronology in his memoir—show that he was trying out various philosophical positions throughout the 1920s. This is what intellectual development is really like; as Lewis liked to point out, only the stodgiest of thinkers advances from one worldview to the next in an orderly fashion, as if traveling by train from station to station. And Lewis was certainly not stodgy; his mind was in constant motion. He was fully aware that the commonsense realism (the position he calls, in Surprised by Joy, “the New Look”) that he had adopted as a defense against eccentricity and brooding could not satisfy all of his intellectual and spiritual needs. Barfield had shown him the contradictions in his position; he was trying to have it both ways—to accept “as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses” but also to shield his logical, moral, and aesthetic judgments from scientific explanations that would empty them of truth-value. He wanted—needed—to overcome the antinomies in his thought, but it would mean hard philosophical work; he would have to formulate a philosophy of mind and matter coherent enough to withstand critical scrutiny.

  If realism failed, the obvious place to turn to was idealism. Idealism had been the dominant philosophical school in Britain from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and still had significant influence. For the classically educated, idealism of one sort or another was a natural tendency; everyone at least knew Plato. Broad sympathy for the school, accompanied by the patriotic thought that, although derived from Plato, Kant, and Hegel, it had now assumed a distinctively British form, created a climate favorable for the Oxford idealism associated with Thomas Hill Green (1836–82), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923).

  Oxford idealism was a complex brew—a system of metaphysics adapted from Kant and Hegel, and their Scottish exegetes McTaggart and Caird, and linked (though by tenuous threads) to a program of moral uplift and social reform. Distilled, it amounted to asserting the existence of a purely mental or spiritual Absolute and acknowledging the existence of things and individuals only as aspects of that Absolute. The real universe, the Oxford idealists maintained, is a single unified whole, a perfect Idea, however manifold and conflicted it may appear. Thus Bradley wrote, in a famous passage in The Principles of Logic, “That the glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms…” Even though perceived through a sensuous curtain, reality is intrinsically intelligible; to awakened reason, the universe is already perfect and eternally at peace. It was an immensely consoling doctrine to one caught in a dreary materialist world; Lewis was particularly delighted by a remark he found in Bosanquet’s Some Suggestions in Ethics about the possibility of friendship with the lower animals: befriend an animal, Bosanquet said, and you will feel “as if the Absolute came to eat out of your hand.”

  To be sure, this was not Lewis’s first encounter with idealism; he had been thoroughly steeped in Plato from his days reading classics with Kirkpatrick, loving everything in the Greek philosopher except the utopian despotism of the Republic. Lewis’s letters to Arthur Greeves on poetry and art read like Platonic rhapsodies on the transcendent reality of the beautiful. He even flirted with a dualism more Gnostic and Romantic than Platonic in tone, in which beauty, as pure spirit, was perennially at war with matter. From his bed in the military hospital at Étaples, Lewis wrote to Arthur, “out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, animal pains) I have formulated my equation Matter = Nature = Satan. And on the other side Beauty, the only spiritual & not-natural thing that I have yet found.”

  When, in 1923, Lewis decided to immerse himself in the idealism of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet, he was a trifle embarrassed to be deserting his hard-won realism in order to follow what he thought was the dominant philosophical fashion. But he soon found out that idealism was already tottering on its high throne. G. E. Moore had published his “Refutation of Idealism” at Cambridge in 1903, and the analytical approach was poised to take Cambridge philosophy by storm, while in Oxford, the commonsense “direct realism” of Cook Wilson (which in turn gave rise to “ordinary language philosophy”) was in the ascendant. In 1901 the humanist F.C.S. Schiller (Oxford’s counterpart to the American pragmatist William James) published Mind!—a wicked and occasionally hilarious parody of the prestigious journal Mind—mocking his philosophical ancestors and elders (among them “F.H. Badly”) and interpreting Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark as a Bradleian allegory for the pursuit of the Absolute (whose portrait, a blank sheet of pink translucent vellum paper, forms the frontispiece).

  Lewis thus found himself caught between two philosophical worlds—he was one of the small band of returned soldiers (the Great War, in cutting a disproportionate swath through Oxbridge scholars, also decimated a whole generation of future philosophers) who found themselves outnumbered both by their seniors and by the rising generation who had been too young to serve in the war. The old guard were mainly idealists of one sort or another, while the newcomers were determined, with the help of recently honed logical and linguistic tools, to cut through the tangles left by their predecessors. Lewis’s generation would play a mediating role, not blazing new trails but seeing to it that the newcomers learned to understand their seniors before they consigned the old philosophy, with its soaring abstractions, to the dustbin.

  Philosophical “isms” rise and fall like hemlines; real philosophers—and Lewis had the makings of one, even if his path led elsewhere—ignore fashions and steer clear of party politics. Thus, in his materialist period Lewis could sympathize with idealists, and in his idealist period he could appreciate the telling criticisms made by rival schools. It was useful to have idealism as a standpoint from which to teach (a classified ad from a desperate instructor in the back pages of Mind! read “WANTED IMMEDIATELY, for Teaching Purposes, an INTELLIGIBLE ABSOLUTE. Money no object. Apply to ‘Tutor’ c/o Ed., MIND!”), but Lewis soon
found, when he had to face actual students, that “the Absolute cannot be made clear” and that British idealism, at least in its post-Berkeleyan form, consisted largely of “mystifications.”

  Once Lewis became a Christian, he would look back on his absolute idealism as a “quasi-religion” that “cost nothing,” mainly because there was no way to trace the lines of connection between the Absolute and the empirical individual self. “We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us.” Idealism was a system of ideas and aspirations that “cannot be lived”—and a philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis heightens the drama of his conversion account by depicting Barfield and Griffiths as rebuking him on this point (philosophy “wasn’t a subject to Plato … it was a way”); but according to Barfield the story is “pure applesauce”—Lewis, he said, was “constitutionally incapable of treating philosophy as a merely academic exercise.”

  Whatever its defects as a way, however, Lewis never regretted his idyll with idealism. When he had shed his materialist skin and was feeling painfully naked, idealism provided a way to cloak that nakedness for a time. He saw, with its help, that if one trusts one’s own judgment, one’s ability to discern truth—as he did, as all thinking people inevitably do—then one must embrace the idea that “mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos” (the influence of Barfield is palpable). Lewis found in idealism a more satisfactory account than materialism could supply of the sacrifices of his comrades in war, the moral seriousness of his friends, and the demands of his own conscience. When his instinct for adoration seemed thwarted at every turn, idealism offered a higher reality to adore intellectually, purely for its own sake, without a hell to fear or a heaven to hope for. Idealism was a rational and ethical mysticism, full of Spirit and free of spirits. It made no occult—or Anthroposophical—claims about intercourse with beings from other worlds. It was sane and wholesome, noble and disinterested. It cleared away obstacles, overcame intellectual inhibitions, and upheld the sense of a universal moral standard (the Tao, as he would call it in The Abolition of Man). “And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.”

  The hook was in the tongue, but of more importance to Lewis at the time, his tongue had finally found an audience. In the spring of 1924, he expanded his philosophical studies, reading with great zest the biography and ethical writings of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More with a view to a D.Phil. dissertation, and lecturing to the Oxford Philosophical Society on “The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics”—a talk that one professor of moral philosophy, William Ross David of Oriel College, found “very attractive.” E. F. Carritt tipped him off about a philosophy fellowship at Trinity College. The prospect dazzled Lewis, who reported in his diary that while heading home in the icy wind, he found himself “in a strange state of excitement—and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.” He didn’t get it, but entry into the promised land was delayed, not withdrawn: on May 5, University College asked him if he would like to tutor philosophy in place of Carritt, who was on his way to America for a year. Lewis gladly accepted; his desert wanderings had ended.

  Contemplation and Enjoyment in the Lecture Hall

  Lewis spent the next academic year (1924–25) tutoring, grading examination papers, and lecturing—a twice-weekly series beginning in October (Michaelmas term) on “The Good, Its Position among Values” and a similar series during Hilary term. A year later, he landed a position as fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, with additional responsibility to tutor in philosophy. The Times heralded the five-year renewable appointment; Lewis would keep the post for twenty-nine years. He made no note of the pivotal day—May 20, 1925, two months before Tolkien would land his professorship in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford—in his diary, which he had suspended writing for several months. Fortunately, his father kept up his own journal, recording that when he, well aware of his son’s poverty, heard the news via telegram, “I went up to [Jack’s] room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers have been heard and answered.” Lewis himself was at the moment applying poultices to his right thumb, bitten deeply on this joyous day by a cat, as he rushed to stop it from lacerating a dog; as he was coming to realize, kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.

  This truth applies also to the microworld of academia. The Oxford system, in which attendance at lectures was optional, made it difficult for a rank newcomer to fill a classroom. By the end of his term as a substitute lecturer on philosophy, Lewis wrote in his diary, “my audience had dwindled to two—Hawker [Gerald Wynne Hawker, an undergraduate] and the old parson. As they professed a wish to continue the course, I had them to my room. I said we could now be informal and I hoped they would interrupt whenever they wanted. The old parson availed himself of this so liberally that I could hardly get a word in.” Lewis was determined to do better in his new incarnation as a lecturer in English and accordingly trained himself to talk from notes rather than read from a prepared script.

  From one perspective, the change from philosophy to English was a step down. English studies still had a lingering reputation for being the “soft option” in the Arts, suitable for women and second-rate scholars destined to become schoolmasters or civil servants; during his undergraduate days, Lewis had found the atmosphere of the English School (as the Faculty of English was known) “amateurish” compared to Philosophy. But he made the best of it, telling his father, “I have come to think if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life—is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?” Philosophy was too solitary and esoteric a discipline for the healthy person he dearly wished to be; nonetheless, he valued the ammunition it (and Barfield) gave him against the naïve positivisms of the day: “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface. It leaves the whole thing rich in possibilities: and if it dashes the shallow optimisms it does the same for the shallow pessimisms.”

  He was also, according to his diary, rereading the Hippolytus of Euripides in March 1924, an event that, according to Surprised by Joy, “annihilated the last remains of the New Look.” We can only guess at what it was about the Hippolytus that affected him so deeply; certainly there was little to incite devotion in the capricious gods and ill-fated heroes that Euripides describes. But whatever applications Lewis may have found to his own life in this story, the main outcome of reading it was to reawaken the longing for Joy. “I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question of returning to the desert. I had been simply ordered—or, rather, compelled—to ‘take that look off my face.’” In retrospect he would see this as the “first Move” God made toward an impending checkmate. The second Move came the following week, when he read Samuel Alexander’s 1920 book (based on his Gifford Lectures), Space, Time, and Deity. Largely forgotten today, Alexander was a pivotal figure in debates between realists and idealists, an influence on Alfred North Whitehead and a forerunner of process philosophy. He developed an emergent model of mental life, in which conscious experience, and with it the sense of self and all the moral and aesthetic intuitions, arises out of neural structures as a genuine novum, dependent upon yet irreducible to its material elements.
At the end of May, Lewis heard Alexander in person, a classically eccentric don, now “bearded and deaf and very venerable,” deliver to the Oxford Philosophical Society a paper on artistic creation—a “satisfying attack on all Croce’s nonsense,” culminating in a grand (though to Lewis hard to follow) vision of “cosmic creation.”

  What Lewis found most helpful in Space, Time, and Deity was the distinction Alexander made between enjoyment and contemplation, a phenomenological analysis of experience that did much, Lewis thought, to overcome the mind-body split, by showing that in every experience there are two aspects: an act of perceiving and an object of perception. One enjoys the act of perceiving and one contemplates the thing perceived. He tried explaining this idea to his philosophy students while a strike was raging outside. “My class was completely unruffled by the strike and still very interested in Berkeley. Miss Thring read a paper. The discussion turned on the self. I told them about Alexander’s distinction of contemplation and enjoyment and they all (I think) got it quite clear. Miss Colborne was specially good, saying to Miss Grant (who wanted to ‘know’ the self) ‘It is as if, not content with seeing with your eyes, you wanted to take them out and look at them—and then they wouldn’t be eyes.’”

  Alexander pointed out that the error of the materialist is to count as real the thing seen and discount as mere epiphenomenon the act of seeing. But there is an opposite error, at once moral and epistemological, which Lewis thought he could see in himself: that of the subjectivist who overvalues his experience and undervalues its object. “I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.” It was a liberating discovery. The “quiver in the diaphragm” wasn’t what he was searching for; that was the path of the spiritual voluptuary. Now he had discovered the “inherent dialectic of desire,” realizing that “all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, ‘It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?’” However Alexander may have helped in the process of discovery, Lewis’s account of the dialectic of desire is far closer in spirit and rhetoric to the Confessions of the great convert-saint Augustine of Hippo: